Incredible! Karl Rove says Obama owes Romney a debt of gratitude for not being a birther!

Republican strategist Karl Rove on Saturday complained that President Barack Obama had “never said thank you” when GOP hopeful Mitt Romney acknowledged he was a U.S. citizen.

Speaking to the hosts of Fox & Friends, Rove defended Romney’s recent suggestion that the president’s birth certificate might not be real as just a “bad joke.”

“He got a good laugh out of it,” Rove explained. “This is faux outrage on the part of the Obama campaign. There was a period of time for the basic part of a year and a half when all these people — Rick Perry, Donald Trump and others — were out there saying Barack Obama was not born in the United States. The White House was completely quiet about it because they just wanted to egg the Republicans on — these Republicans sort of out there on the fringe — to say these kinds of things because it was so self-discrediting.”

“The one guy, who consistently said — dismissed this and defended the president as having been born in the United States — in the middle of a contentious primary — was Mitt Romney.”